FIG. 1 (Prior Art) is a simplified system level diagram of the electronics of a standard television 1. An incoming signal is received, for example via an antenna 2 or a coaxial cable 3. The signal passes through a tuner 4, a demodulator 5, an analog-to-digital converter 6, and a display processor 7. Display processor 7 is typically a commercially available off-the-shelf integrated circuit. Display processors are available from numerous manufacturers including Genesis Microchip Inc., Pixelworks Inc, Trident Microsystems Inc., and Silicon Image Inc. Display processor 7 may, for example, implement certain picture enhancement algorithms. Frames of video information are stored in an external RAM 8. Display processor 7 also interfaces to a microcontroller 9. Enhanced video features such as Picture-In-Picture (PIP), Picture-Out-Picture (POP), Cinema 1, Cinema 2, format conversion, film detection, panorama scaling, alpha blending and overlay, VBI/Closed Captioning, and On-Screen Display (OSD) may be controlled through microcontroller 9. The output of display processor 7 passes through driver electronics 10 and to the display device. The display device may, for example, be a cathode ray tube (CRT) 11, a liquid crystal display (LCD) screen 12, or a plasma display 16. Audio passes through audio circuitry 13 and to speaker 14.
An individual television manufacturer may, however, want to implement a custom video enhancement algorithm and/or other special feature. Such a custom enhancement feature may be implemented for branding purposes and to provide a measure of distinction over televisions made by other manufacturers. To facilitate implementing such custom algorithms, an interface is provided on display processor 7 so that display processor 7 can be coupled with a custom external device such as an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), specially-configured field programmable gate array (FPGA) 15, DSP, or microprocessor. The custom enhancement algorithm is performed by the external device, and the resulting processed information is communicated back to display processor 7 for output to the display device.
There are numerous such custom video enhancement algorithms. One particular example relates to a particular LCD display that can be driven. To make the LCD display look brighter, the LCD power amplifiers of the LCD are specially tuned in accordance with this enhancement technique based on characteristics of the video signal. When this is done, the LCD display looks brighter.